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Talk:CASE/@comment-24312509-20141224203341/@comment-1291347-20150114171230
In keeping with the four-letter naming convention: * BERT - A reference to physicist Albert Einstein, who penned the theory of relativity. * DAVE - A reference to fictional astronaut Dave Bowman, the main character from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (This will purposefully be the only fictional reference on the list). * NEIL - A reference to astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. * BUZZ - A reference to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon (and a holy terror if you come up to him spouting that "faked moon landing" nonsense). * GARI - A reference to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth. * NICO - A reference to Nicolaus Copernicus, who formulated the heliocentric model of the universe. * ARTH - A reference to speculative-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who conceptualized the idea of using satellites as a means of mass communication. * ERNE (pronounced "Ernie") - A reference to Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led the sailing vessel Endurance on the 1914 expedition to the Antarctic. * LORE - Contrary to the Star Trek reference, this is a reference to physicist Hendrik Lorentz, whose work in electrodynamics was the basis of the Lorentz factor, the ratio by which time, length, and relativistic mass changes for an object as it moves through spacetime. In short: time dilation. * RAND - A reference to Project RAND (Research ANd Development), which developed scientific uses of satellite vehicles. * VERN - A reference to Wernher von Braun (based on the German pronunciation), one of the fathers of rocket science. * ZAAC - A reference to Sir Isaac Newton, who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation. * ALAN, GRIS, GLEN, CARP, WALY, COOP, & DEKE - References to the Mercury 7 astronauts: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton. * EIKE - A reference US President Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, who established NASA in 1958. * KENY - A reference to US President John F. Kennedy, who kicked the Space Race into high gear by establishing Project Apollo. There are also names based on the history of the space program: * MERC - Short for "Mercury", reference to Project Mercury, the first American human spaceflight program. * GEMI (pronounced "Jimmy") - A reference to Project Gemini, the second American human spaceflight program. * POLL (pronounced "Paul") - A reference to Project Apollo, the third American human spaceflight program. * RION (pronounced "Ryan") - A reference to the command module of Project Constellation / SLS as well as the 1950's nuclear propulsion concept. * STOK - A reference to Project Vostok, the Russian competitor to Project Mercury that put the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. * SPUT - A reference to Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite. Like TARS, there are some clever play-on-words with space terms: * MONO - A jumble of the word "moon". * BROT - A jumble of the letters O-R-B-T, which is a shortening of "orbit". * TASE - A jumble of the letters S-A-T-E, which is short for "satellite". * KLUB - A jumble of the word "bulk", the hyper-dimensional space in which three-dimensional space exists as a membrane. * ATMO - A shortening of the word "atmosphere". * MITE - A jumble of the word "time". * PACS - A jumble of the letters S-P-A-C, which is a shortening of "space". * ROCK - A shortening of the word "rocket". There are several with other "robot-y"-sounding names - similar to CASE - like CABL (cable), SPRK (spark), TRAN (transistor), GATE (as in logic gate), PROC (processor), LINK, FORK, TROD (pronounced "trode", as in electrode), TORK (as in torque), etc. ...and last but not least... * ABLE and BAKR (pronounced "Baker"), the first two robots of the line - A reference to Miss Able and Miss Baker, the first two animals launched into space and recovered safely by the United States.